Current Table of Contents

• Penumbral Publics: An Occasional Thematic Issue
  
• Enregistering Modernity, Bluffing Criminality: How Nouchi Speech Reinvented (and Fractured) the Nation
  This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban patois) in Côte d'Ivoire, arguing that the struggles to define the indexical values of Nouchi and the performative bluff of urban street life associated with it have played a central role in the production of Ivoirian national identity. Speakers of Nouchi integrate references to American pop culture with local Ivoirian lexical content, which allows Nouchi use ambivalently to index both modernity and autochthony. In so doing they overturn the hierarchical schema of evaluation defined by proximity to the French standard. Nouchi indexes a new pan-ethnic Ivoirian identity based on the alternative modernity of cosmopolitan urban youth. Urban youth reject the Francocentric elitism of the postcolonial state but themselves exclude Northern migrants, whom they qualify as less than modern, from Ivoirian citizenship. [modernity, enregisterment, French, Nouchi, indexicality, Côte d'Ivoire]
• Why is This a Battle Every Night?: Negotiating Food and Eating in American Dinnertime Interaction
  This article analyzes interactions about food and eating among dual-earner middle-class families in Los Angeles, California. It synthesizes approaches from linguistic and medical anthropology to investigate how health is defined and negotiated both in interviews and in everyday communication. In particular, it explores dinnertime episodes from five families to illustrate how interactional bargaining contributes to struggles between parents and children over health-related practices, values, and morality. It compares naturally occurring videotaped interactions to parents' evaluations of their families' health elicited in interviews. The analysis of food interactions reveals much about the discursive construction of health and family life, including frequent conflicts between parents and children over eating practices. [health, food and eating, dinnertime interaction, children, working families, United States]
• The Relevance of Husserl's Theory to Language Socialization
  This article suggests that the theory of language socialization could benefit from adopting some key concepts originally introduced by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the first part of the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on Husserl's notion of "(phenomenological) modification," to be understood as a change in "the natural attitude" that humans have toward the phenomenal world, their own actions included. After providing examples of different kinds of modifications in interpreting language and listening to music, Husserl's notion of "theoretical attitude" (a modification of "the natural attitude") is introduced and shown to be common in adult conversations as well as in interactions between adults and young children. A reanalysis of an exchange previously examined by Platt (1986) between a Samoan mother and her son is provided to show the benefits of an integration of phenomenological and interactional perspectives on adult-child discourse. Finally, it is suggested that the failure sometimes experienced by children and adults to adopt new ways of being may be due to the accumulated effects of modifications experienced earlier in life which make it difficult if not impossible to retrieve earlier, premodificational ways of being. [language socialization, phenomenology, jazz aesthetics, Samoan child language]
• Signs of Respect: Neighborhood, Public, and Language in Barcelona
  This article focuses on a protest banner campaign by a neighborhood association in an economically marginal neighborhood of Barcelona. Through the campaign, participants simultaneously coached neighborhood-level addressees (including immigrants) in respectable behavior and projected an image of neighborhood respectability to the media and City Hall. Linguistic behaviors were central to this process, including code choice, linguistic normativity, and intertextuality. This article makes three theoretical points. First, while the literature on publics stresses a historical shift between embodied publicness and disembodied publicness, this article shows that embodied publicness and disembodied publicness are inextricably interrelated. Second, it demonstrates that neighborhoods are key sites for the articulation of these two forms of publicness, through the regimentation and projection of personal respectability. Third, it reveals the importance of a careful ethnography of writing, which allows the disambiguation of differently scaled sets of addressees. [neighborhoods, publics, respectability, immigration, Catalan]
• The Masque of Undergrounder and Spy: Ubiquitous Addressivity, Dependent Social Roles, and Panopticism among Nineteenth Century Mormon Polygamists
  As newspapers and rumors reported the presence[mdash]apparent, actual, or potential[mdash]of federal agents charged with surveillance of polygynous Mormons, the undergrounder emerged in the 1880s as a figure sharing the spy's metapragmatic register: namely, concealment of role-indexical signs. Seeming ubiquitous address by unseen but always possible agents of the law riveted the spy to the body of undergrounder. Bound to a spiraling play of reveal-and-conceal, the undergrounder's presence also summoned an "abduced" imaginary called "the underground." Here suspicion was general; forms were questioned, disarticulated, assigned provisional indexicalities. Every sign could suggest an observer, a secret code, a warning to hide. The paranoid undergrounder thus was discursively incarcerated and panoptically triangulated as a modern subject. The underground ironically splintered the Mormon resistance, and realized the Supreme Court's decree that, in short, the citizen's body be severed from the colonized subject's imagination. [panopticon, mass media, secrecy, paranoia, modernity]
• The Discursive Construction of the German Welfare State: Interests and Institutionality
  This article consists of an initial theoretical attempt to describe "interests" as widespread social phenomena which emerge specifically from discursive interaction. I focus on the way in which the indexical signaling of discourse participation roles and public/private standings provide key conditions of possibility for the emergence of interests in interactional real time. The case at hand involves the German welfare state, a social institution which is constituted both on the local level of my fieldsite (a working-class suburb of the former East Berlin) and on the national level (through the popular media and through the circulation of laws, policy documents and the like). [Germany, welfare state, interests, indexical orders, institutionality]
• Daily Wires and Daily Blossoms: Cultivating Regimes of Circulation in Tamil India's Newspaper Revolution
  Two of Tamil India's most popular newspapers both claim to be using "spoken" as opposed to "written" varieties of Tamil, despite appealing to different class and gender sensibilities. Developing a method that can take into account the relations among (1) explicit metadiscourses on journalistic language, (2) variegated reading practices, and (3) the formal qualities of newspapers as text artifacts, I argue that what is at stake in the difference between the two papers in my comparison is in fact a difference in regimes of circulation[mdash]cultivated habits of animating artifactually mediated texts, enabling the movement of discourse along predictable social trajectories. Claims to using the language of speech in the press refer to two very different phenomena: a Tamil written to be spoken aloud at the point of reading in one paper, and a "spoken Tamil" made to be read silently in the other.[media, publics, reading, textuality, circulation, India]
• Can the Avatar Speak?
  
• Style: Language Variation and Identity – By Nikolas Coupland
  
• Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius – By Patrick Eisenlohr
  
• Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, Methods, and Applications – Edited by Robert Bayley and Ceil Lucas
  
• Discourse: Key Topics in Sociolinguistics – By Jan Blommaert
  
• The Language of Pain: Expression or Description? – By Chryssoula Lascaratou
  
• The Word Weavers: Newshounds and Wordsmiths – By Jean Aitchison
  
• Metaphor and Gesture – Edited by Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller
  
• Publications Received